“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.”
~ TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
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The Unknown Author: “A metaphor is like a simile.”
23 Feb
“A metaphor is like a simile.”
~ Author Unknown
Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
22 Feb
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
~ NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Ernest Hemingway: “All good books are alike.”
21 Feb
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
~ ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Anais Nin (b. Feb 21): “If you don’t cry out or sing, then don’t write.”
21 Feb
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”
~ Anais Nin, b. 21 February 1903
Truman Capote: “When I think how good my book can be…”
18 Feb
“Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.”
~ TRUMAN CAPOTE
Ian McEwan: “The dream is to write this beautiful paragraph.”
16 Feb
“The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer.”
~ IAN McEWAN
E.L. Doctorow: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night.”
13 Feb
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
~ E. L. DOCTOROW
Ezra Pound: “Never put more on a page than the common reader can lap off it.”
12 Feb
“The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.”
~ EZRA POUND
George Orwell: “The enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
11 Feb
“A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”
~ GEORGE ORWELL
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